The ability to visualize and manipulate structures with dimensions that are on the order of nanometers, or billionths of a meter, forms the basis of the field of nanotechnology, a world of miniaturization that has long captured the scientific imagination. One of the foremost visionaries in nanotechnology was American physicist and Nobelist Richard P. Feynman, who in 1959 delivered a lecture titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” in which he presented an extraordinary vision of what could be done with extreme miniaturization.

In that lecture, as Britannica’s entry on nanotechnology notes, Feynman famously asked:

“Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica on the head of a pin? Let’s see what would be involved. The head of a pin is a sixteenth of an inch across. If you magnify it by 25,000 diameters, the area of the head of the pin is then equal to the area of all the pages of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Therefore, all it is necessary to do is to reduce in size all the writing in the Encyclopædia by 25,000 times. Is that possible? The resolving power of the eye is about 1/120 of an inch—that is roughly the diameter of one of the little dots on the fine half-tone reproductions in the Encyclopædia. This, when you demagnify it by 25,000 times, is still 80 angstroms in diameter—32 atoms across, in an ordinary metal. In other words, one of those dots still would contain in its area 1,000 atoms. So, each dot can easily be adjusted in size as required by the photoengraving, and there is no question that there is enough room on the head of a pin to put all of the Encyclopædia Britannica.”

With the development of the scanning tunneling microscope in 1981 by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, who received the 1986 Nobel Prize for Physics for their work, scientists finally had the power to image individual atoms on the surfaces of conducting or semiconducting materials (materials that are able to conduct electricity under certain conditions). Numerous observations of nano-scale phenomena followed, including the 1985 discovery by Robert F. Curl, Jr., Harold W. Kroto, and Richard E. Smalley of nanometer-sized carbon structures known as fullerenes. This discovery, which resulted in Curl, Kroto, and Smalley sharing the 1996 Nobel Prize for Physics, opened a new chapter in nanotechnology, particularly because of the potential applications for fullerenes in electronics, materials science, and even medicine.

Despite the continued advance of nanoscience, much remains to be understood about nanomaterials and their behavior. Of notable concern in the manufacture of nano-sized entities is the ability to control their atomic structure. But improvements in technologies and tools used in nanomaterial assembly have enabled the production of nano-scale products and product prototypes, such as electronic, magnetic, and mechanical nano-scale devices. Nanocoatings that render surfaces resistant to corrosion and nanoparticles with applications in medicine (e.g., drug delivery) and environmental remediation have also been developed or investigated.